


Long Intervals of Horrible Sanity

by letmetellyouaboutmyfeels



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Horror, Alternate Universe - Mental Institution, Alternate Universe - Victorian, An English Major, Apologies To My Gothic Novel Professor For This, For Those of You Who Notice Things Like Timelines, I Am Also Appalled at Myself Trust Me, I Gave Up On Writing Period-Appropriate Dialogue, I Love Her Muchly, Multi, Non-Graphic Violence, Not Gonna Lie the Ship Stuff Is A Lot More Subtle Than My Usual, Not Sure What Warnings To Tag For, Re: The Civil War, So Feel Free To Inform Me Of Any You Feel Need Tagging, Sorry That Denise is Barely In Here, Takes Place in 1888, This is How I Utilize My English Major, Yes This Means I Fudged Wyatt's Age a Bit, yes you heard me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-04
Updated: 2019-11-04
Packaged: 2021-01-22 20:18:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21308012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/letmetellyouaboutmyfeels/pseuds/letmetellyouaboutmyfeels
Summary: Lucy Preston knows her sister Amy exists.Garcia Flynn knows he didn't kill his family.Wyatt Logan knows his wife is dead, which doesn't explain why he keeps seeing her.But in Usher Asylum, what you know might just eat you alive.
Relationships: Garcia Flynn/Wyatt Logan/Lucy Preston, Rufus Carlin/Jiya
Comments: 4
Kudos: 17





	Long Intervals of Horrible Sanity

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be my fic for Halloween '19 but as you can see, it's being posted four days late. C'est last vie. I felt the horror in this wasn't too graphic, and so I made it a T, but please note my Poe and Lovecraft hyperfocuses are coming to the fore here. If you can handle those two, you can definitely handle my fic. If you can't, maybe proceed with caution.

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” ~ Edgar Allan Poe

* * *

Lucy Preston yanked her arms hard against the orderlies dragging her down the corridor. “Mother!” she screamed. Carol Preston’s stern, yet concerned face was rapidly growing smaller on the other side of the door. “I’m not—I’m not insane—let me go—Amy’s real, she’s _real_, I swear, why am I the only one who remembers—she’s real, she’s _real_!”

The orderlies moved her around like she was a rag doll, ignoring her pleas. She knew she wasn’t insane, she wasn’t meant to be here. Usher Asylum was for the unsane, those with ill minds, and she wasn’t, she knew it, she had grown up with a sister named Amy—why should every acquaintance refuse to admit to knowing her, why should everyone lie to her, what was happening!?

She was forced to sit down on a bed in a small, bare room, with a tiny window revealing the gray, stormy skies and some dark leafless trees outside, their branches scratching against the pane like a witch’s fingers, like skeleton hands.

“Drink this, and take this, it will calm you,” one of the orderlies said, passing her a small cup and a pill.

“I don’t need pills,” Lucy protested. “I’m not mad, I swear it, my sister is real, it’s my mother, it’s the world that’s gone all mad!”

“That’s what they all say,” the orderly told her with an impatient sigh. “Now, drink up.”

Lucy threw the water in the orderly’s face.

They seized her again, and she was forced down onto the bed, a needle carefully inserted into her arm even as she struggled. There was no more awful feeling, she thought dimly in the back of her mind, than screaming for help and knowing others could hear, but also knowing that none of them would come to her aid.

And then she wasn’t sure what she was thinking.

It was all like melted glass.

“Your forgot me!” Amy screamed at her from the other side of a mirror. A hall of mirrors, corridors of them. Darkness stretched across the hallways, everything elongated and terrifying. She was swimming, drowning, running, all at once.

“You forgot me!” Amy screamed, nails on a chalkboard, and she was back at the balls in a fancy dress but the corset was too tight, she couldn’t breathe, and her skirts tripped her up as everyone stared at her with ghoulish expressions. She couldn’t remember their expressions when she awoke but in the moment she screamed in terror.

“You forgot me!” Amy screamed in the rain, only the rain was blood, and Lucy was choking on it—

She woke up in a cold sweat.

Lucy rolled over, fishing for the bed pan, dry heaving. Nothing came up. Why should it? They kept them close to starving here. Another way to hold power over them.

This small room with its gray bare walls, the thin mattress on the bed, and the witch-finger tree outside the window were all that she had known for the past few… days? Weeks? She no longer knew.

In that moment, her mind felt clearer than it had since she had first arrived and she sat up, surprised to find that her limbs were no longer restrained. They had been restrained for some time, hadn’t they? She could remember struggling against them, tossing and turning, too uncomfortable even to sleep…

Holding her wrists up to the light, Lucy could see red-yellow marks on her wrists. Bruises, from tugging at the restraints. So she hadn’t imagined that, at least.

Getting up gingerly, she tested her legs. They were weak and wobbly, like she hadn’t stood on them in weeks. How long had she been in here?

She walked carefully over to the window, peering out into a bare courtyard. It looked like the sort of place where people were supposed to be allowed to get some exercise, the tall, crumbling buildings of the asylum rising up all around the sadly small patch of grass and benches and bare trees.

Lucy expected to see a few lights in some of the windows, but the place was all dark, like a monster with a gaping mouth and black holes for eyes. It was like she was all alone here.

…was she all alone?

She crossed over to the door that led out into the hall, peering through the small window. If she got onto her tiptoes she could just barely see through it to reveal a bare, dark corridor.

Lucy swallowed, then knocked on the door. “Anyone else there?”

All was silent. If there was anyone else on this hall with her, they were asleep.

She turned away, only to hear—

_You forgot me!_

Crying, someone was crying, it sounded like Amy crying—

Lucy flew back to the door, faster than she thought she could. “Who’s there?”

The crying continued, soft but echoing. Lucy grabbed the door handle, shaking it. “Amy! Amy! I’m here! I haven’t forgotten you!”

There was no answer. But someone, somewhere, was crying.

Lucy was sure of it.

* * *

The only person who believed him when he said he didn’t do it was Stiv.

Stiv had seen Flynn at his worst, in the middle of war, skewering men, trying to save men, yelling, screaming, crying. The only difference between Hell and war was that the only people caught in Hell were guilty. War got everyone, including—especially—the innocent. Stiv had been there with him, for all of it, and if Garcia Flynn said he didn’t kill his family, then thank God, Stiv believed him.

“It’s a frame up,” Flynn said on the third day in the asylum. He had no idea why he was here at Usher instead of down in the city prison but he supposed he shouldn’t complain. He had his own room here, and it was quiet.

Too quiet, actually.

Stiv nodded. God only knew who he’d had to bribe to get an audience with Flynn. “It’s too neat. And the way they were—you’d never do that. I know you, Flynn, don’t worry. We’ll find a way to get you out.”

“You should be more worried about who’ll come after you if you try to prove my innocence,” Flynn replied. “I upset someone, and they want me out of the way. They’ll want you out of the way too if you’re not careful.”

“Do you have any idea who you upset? Were you taking on any jobs from our friends abroad?”

‘Our friend abroad’ was their term for any of the various governments Flynn had spied for over the years. Europe was always full of political intrigue, and if you asked Flynn, the continent was building steadily towards something—a massive breakdown. For a veteran of war, and a stranger in a new land, there weren’t a lot of options, and so Flynn had turned his skills towards the acquiring and distributing of information for certain interested parties.

Flynn glanced around. They were supposedly in a large room with only a young nurse—somewhere in her late twenties—sorting out paperwork nearby to keep an eye on them, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that they were being watched in other ways. The walls seemed to be closing in, the entire place oppressing.

“A friend abroad did ask me to look into the finances of Connor Mason,” Flynn said quietly, switching to his native tongue. He doubted the tan skinned, night-eyed nurse would be able to understand him. “I did as instructed and found that he’s been doing some banking dealings with some person or institution by the name of Rittenhouse. I couldn’t find out hide nor hair of them, it was just a name written on some cheques he’d cashed. But I reported that along with everything else—I asked our friend about it—and next thing I know I’m coming home to Lorena and Iris…”

He swallowed, his throat closing up. He couldn’t say it. Couldn’t voice what—what that monster, or monsters, had done to his wife and little girl.

“I’ll see what I can find,” Stiv promised. “I’ll get you out. But I have to warn you, Flynn, that I don’t think they’ll let me back in to see you again. I had to practically threaten them this time.”

“It’s all right. You’re already risking enough as it is.”

The nurse got up from her table and walked over. “I’m sorry, sir,” she said, and she really did sound apologetic, “but your time is up, I have to ask you to leave. Mr. Flynn needs to return to his room now.” To Flynn she said, “It’s time for your pills.”

Yeah, his pills. For the past two days he’d been hiding them under his tongue and spitting them out. He didn’t know what they intended to do to his state of mind with those but he had absolutely no intention of letting any kind of medicine fuck with his mind.

Stiv stood up, nodding at Flynn, and then nodded at the nurse, heading out. The nurse looked at Flynn expectantly.

Flynn sighed and got to his feet. “Lead on, Macduff.”

The nurse took him back to his room, where she handed him the pills. Judging by how quiet it was in this damn place, he guessed the pills were supposed to sedate him, so he’d been pretending to pass out afterwards and it had seemed to do the trick.

“Knock, knock!” said a falsely jovial voice, and Flynn saw the nurse wince as his door was opened and another man entered.

Flynn recognized him. It was the man who’d overseen Flynn’s incarceration into the asylum. Head doctor Benjamin Cahill.

“Dr. Cahill.” The nurse looked nervous. “You’re doing personal calls to the patients?”

Flynn had to hold in a snort at the disbelieving, almost sarcastic tone in her voice. It was just subtle enough that he didn’t think Cahill noticed.

“I have to make sure that our patients are taking their medicine, don’t I?” Cahill gave Flynn a smile that made something inside of Flynn curl up into a snarling coil, like a snake about to strike.

Both the nurse and Flynn stared at Cahill, until Cahill made a _tssk_ing noise and gestured at the nurse. “Go on then, Jiya, for goodness’ sake, we’re not waiting for Armageddon.”

Jiya handed Flynn his little cup of pills, and he started to tip them into his mouth, prepared to hide them as before—only for Cahill to seize him by the back of the throat and the nose.

Flynn coughed, forced to swallow instinctively in order to breathe, and the pills slid right down his throat. Fuck. He was lucky he hadn’t choked on them.

“There we are.” Cahill pulled away, and Flynn had never wanted to punch the smug look off of someone’s face so hard in his life before.

Cahill turned to Jiya. “Make sure he’s actually taking them.”

Jiya looked at Flynn, or rather, at the top of Flynn’s head, then looked down at herself, then back at Cahill.

There were about eight inches of height difference between Flynn and Jiya.

Cahill sighed as if Jiya was the bane of his existence, then gave Flynn a stern look, and swept out.

Now that Cahill was gone, Flynn could feel the horror setting in. Shit, he’d swallowed the pills. Fucking swallowed them. Now they could do whatever they wanted with him, tie him down and keep him sedated for as long as they wanted—

Jiya gave him an awkward sort of half-smile. “I’ll bring you your dinner,” she murmured, and left.

Flynn sat down on the bed, waiting for the dizziness, the sleepiness, to set in. Waiting to become disoriented and to lose his motor functions.

He waited. And waited. And waited.

Jiya returned with his meager meal on a tray, and Flynn stood up. Jiiya startled, the tray shaking. “You shouldn’t do that,” she snapped, setting the tray down.

“Why don’t I feel different?” Flynn demanded. “Why haven’t the pills done anything? I know they’re supposed to sedate me. You know why I’m here. What they say I’ve done. I heard them when I was being dragged in here. Why aren’t I passed out like a log now?”

Jiya’s guilty face said it all. Slowly, she set her tray down, the shakiness gone, and Flynn saw a steely look in her that he would not have expected.

“I’ve been giving you sugar pills,” she admitted. “You and a few others. I know that you’re not crazy. I know you didn’t do it. Something’s wrong here—I started working here to help people, and instead…”

She passed him his food. “Look at what they’re giving you. You’re a giant, and they think you can survive on one meal a day like this? That and the pills? There’s a woman in the other building, they keep her tied down all day, give her hallucinogens. She’s been sobbing for her sister. And there’s two others, men like you, men they want out of the way. And it’s—it’s wrong.”

“How do you know I didn’t do it?” Flynn challenged. “Were you there?”

“…no,” Jiya replied. “I just—I just know, all right? I know you’re not crazy. Neither are the others.”

Flynn spread his hands. “And what do you want us to do about it? We can’t break out.”

“I—I don’t know,” Jiya said. “But it’s better than letting you lie there all drugged up, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“I’ll—I’ll see what I can do, so you can meet the others,” Jiya said in a hushed rush. “You all should see what’s happening. Maybe—maybe you can figure it out.”

“You grow more of a mystery every second, Miss Jiya.”

Jiya smiled at him. “Eat your soup, Mr. Flynn.”

Flynn made an exaggerated show of taking a bite of his soup, and Jiya nodded sharply at him. “Just play along for Cahill, all right?” she counseled, and then she was gone.

Flynn noticed she didn’t lock the door behind her.

* * *

Wyatt wasn’t dragged into the asylum. He checked himself in.

Which was what he explained to Rufus Carlin, the only other patient he’d met in this place after a week of being there.

“You checked yourself in?” Rufus asked. “Pardon the expression, but are you crazy?”

“Yes,” Wyatt replied bluntly, glaring at him. They were in a large room with Nurse Jiya overseeing in the corner. Wyatt wasn’t sure what to make of her, or of this place. It was like there was something watching him around every corner and he kept dreaming about the shadows curling and snaking like living animals.

It was fucking creepy.

“Okay,” Rufus said, “Why?”

“Why are you in here?” Wyatt shot back, his skin crawling, feeling defensive.

“You noticed my skin color?” Rufus replied, just as blunt. “The war might be over but our fight isn’t. I pissed off the wrong people and now I’m here.”

“Who’d you piss off? You don’t sound too concerned about it.”

“I don’t know who I pissed off, actually,” Rufus said, quieting a little as he seemed to consider it. Outside, the bleak weather continued, the wind howling around the building, the trees scratching at the windowpanes. “I’m a scientist. I work with, this one guy you might’ve heard of him, Connor Mason? He’s pretty high up in society, he’s a patron of artists, mostly from Harlem, he’s been trying to push the jazz scene. But he’s dabbled in science too, and that’s how we met. He’s got a lot of friends in high places and it was after I started asking about a few of them that I ended up here. Mason promised he’d get me out, though, so. I figure, he’ll just smooth whoever’s feathers I ruffled and it’ll be fine. I could be in jail, y’know, that’d be worse. At least here it’s quiet.”

Rufus looked over at Jiya as he said it, and Wyatt thought he could see the guy blushing. “Oh, yeah, and it’s nothing to do with the company you’ve got here?” Wyatt jerked his head towards Jiya.

Rufus glared at him. “That’s—that’s nothing, all right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“So why are you here, soldier?” Rufus shot back, shoving the conversation back onto Wyatt’s shoulders.

Wyatt sighed. Rufus probably wasn’t going to stop until he got an answer. Neither of them had seen anyone for a while, besides the nurses and doctors—not all of whom were as nice as Jiya—and they weren’t the talkative type.

The door to the room opened and a redheaded woman in a crisp coat entered. Wyatt recognized her as the doctor who’d checked him in, Dr. Whitmore. “Mr. Logan? It’s time for your weekly appointment, if you’ll follow me to my office?”

“Go get her,” Wyatt whispered to Rufus, tilting his head at Jess.

“I hate you,” Rufus whispered back as Wyatt stood up.

Dr. Whitmore didn’t remind Wyatt of a person so much as a pillar of stone. Like she’d been giving up pieces of herself and turning it all, bit by bit, into marble.

“So, Mr. Logan.” She sat down at the desk in her office, a small, cramped space that made Wyatt feel like the walls were closing in on them, watching, hunched over their shoulders like trolls. “Why don’t we talk about how you met… Jessica? Was that your wife? The reason you checked yourself in?”

Wyatt really didn’t see how all this talk could help him, but something had to give. He shifted uncomfortably in his chair across from the doctor.

“I, uh, so I went into the war, y’know, when I was young. Probably too young. And it was… it was shit. We were told that we were fighting in the south for our freedom, when really we were just fighting to keep the rich white people where they were, we were fighting so they could keep their slaves and hold power over them and over us. And I didn’t get that until—until I met Jess. She’s a Yank.” Wyatt couldn’t help but smile, remembering Jess’s fire, her conviction. Then he remembered the rest. “I mean, she was a Yank. She… she died.”

“I’m sorry.”

Wyatt shrugged. “Well. She… she had her own life and she didn’t like me intruding on it, and I wasn’t always as understanding as I should’ve been, and we got into a fight and she—they only found—the police didn’t want me to see all of it.”

Dr. Whitmore nodded, taking some notes.

Wyatt pushed forward through the last bit. “I know she’s dead, but I keep seeing her. Glimpsing her around—in crowds or lurking near our apartment. I knew that I—I had to get help. So I’m here.”

“Have you seen Jess since you’ve been here?” Dr. Whitmore asked.

“Uh… I mean, a bit? In my dreams? Or I think they’re dreams. It’s hard to tell.”

Dr. Whitmore nodded. “And what do you think Jess wants from you? Or your mind wants from you, giving you these hallucinations of her?”

“I… I don’t know. I think maybe the—the guilt?” Wyatt shrugged. “It’s my fault she’s dead. I got all—jealous, over this person, and she insisted on walking home by herself, and that was when it happened.”

“I think, once you accept that you have to let Jess go, that you’ll stop seeing her,” Dr. Whitmore said. “To help with that, we have some new pills. I’ll have Jiya bring them to you with dinner.”

Wyatt was not a fan of the meals here but eating bare, mealy dinners was probably the least of his problems, so he didn’t say anything. “Thanks.”

Dr. Whitmore nodded at him, giving a tight-lipped smile. “Certainly. It’s our job to help you feel better, Mr. Logan.”

Wyatt wasn’t sure why the way she said that gave him uncomfortable chills. Like someone was walking over his grave.

Jiya brought his dinner, as usual, avoiding eye contact. She seemed on edge, and Wyatt felt infected by it, like he was waiting for something to happen but he didn’t even know what it was.

He tossed and turned all night, and maybe it was the pills or something, but he could’ve sworn he felt like he was floating and sinking at the same instant, like he was stuck in some halfway point between existence and non-existence. At some point he thought he even heard crying.

Wyatt rolled over, pressing his hand to his forehead. Fuck, did he have a fever? Was he burning up?

A cool hand pressed itself to his forehead. “Jess?” His voice was rough, croaking like a frog.

“Shh.” Jess gently pushed his hair back from his forehead. “You need to give up on this, Wyatt.”

He tried to grab for her but his arms wouldn’t work. “Jess… Jess…”

“It’s all right.” Jess sounded sad. “You need to move on. You’re not seeing me, I’m not really here.”

“But I miss you.” He could feel himself starting to cry and he hated it. He blinked, and he saw her—saw Jess—but her face was wrong, and she was crying but it was bloody, and where her tears slid down her cheeks they left rotted flesh behind—

“I know, I know, but it’s time to let me go.” Jess sounded upset, and that just made Wyatt _more _upset, and he couldn’t _move_—

Jess pulled away, and he called after her, but his voice was stolen, and the world was stolen, and it all spiraled into a hungry darkness.

* * *

It took Lucy about three days to figure out that someone had switched out her regular pills for sugar ones.

After she found she was no longer in the grip of strange, terrifying hallucinations, half-asleep, her limbs heavy and uncoordinated, she tried to figure out why she was now in possession of her senses. When she crunched down on a pill and watery sugar exploded over her tongue, she had her answer.

Someone was helping her. Someone, somewhere, knew she wasn’t crazy. Knew that Amy was real, just as she did.

Now she had to prove it.

It took her a few days, but the metal teeth of her comb were filed down and peeled back, adapted, rearranged until her fingers were cut and bleeding, into a lockpick.

It took another day for her to figure out how to actually pick the lock, but once she did…

Lucy held her breath as she swung open the door to her room.

It was late at night—she couldn’t tell what time it was, as there were no clocks to guide her—and she was relatively certain that nobody else was up.

Easing her way out into the hallway, she gently closed the door behind her, keeping her comb with her just in case. The metal was sharp, it could do damage if something tried to attack her.

Lucy couldn’t have said why she felt like something—and _thing_, rather than _one_, rather than _person_—might come after her. She just—it seemed to fit the atmosphere of this place. She had read in the papers about this person the London press was calling ‘the Ripper’ and for some reason she felt as though that was the sort of person she might run into wandering the halls of this place.

But she had to find the source of the crying. She had to. What if it really was Amy?

She crept forward along the hallway, at first determined to stick to the shadows. But the shadows…

It felt like they were clinging to her.

Like they were wrapping around her, draping themselves over her, actual beings with substance—

Lucy stumbled out into the middle of the hallway, into the light, holding the comb out in front of her like a sword. For a moment her heart was beating so loudly she could’ve sworn that the building itself had a heart that was beating, and she could hear it in the walls, feel it in the floor.

Her breath came in fast and she had to struggle to keep it somewhat even. Standing alone in the middle of this hallway, with only the dimmest of lights illuminating it, Lucy felt like maybe keeping her locked in her room wasn’t so much to keep her inside as it was to keep her safe. The shadows around her were moving like… like those of an octopus or some other sea creature she had seen only in books, heard about only in tales from sailors.

“Amy?” she whispered. If she could find Amy, it would all be okay. She just had to find Amy.

Silence was the only response.

Lucy swallowed, shook herself, and crept further down the hallway. She knew her sister existed, despite what her mother and everyone else said, and someone must believe her because they’d been giving her sugar pills. She had an ally here. She only had to find them.

She tried up and down the hallways, knocking on doors, but it seemed there was no one. As the darkness pressed in around her further, and she moved more through the building only to be greeted with silence, she began to wonder if she was the only one here. Was she alone? Without even a doctor or nurse? Was she just… here, to be eaten by—by whatever was made of shadows and stalking her and—

Her breathing became choppy again and Lucy ran faster, trying to find a way out, not caring anymore about answers, just about escaping, but it felt like the corridors were twisting and turning like a maze and she no longer knew where anything was.

And the darkness was hungry.

She could feel it, the darkness was _hungry_, it wanted something, it was reaching for something, beating in the walls like a heart, scratching with long fingernails, pounding like fists.

Lucy sank down onto her knees and braced her hands on the floor, trying to steady herself. She squeezed her eyes shut. She wanted it to stop. She wasn’t crazy, she _wasn’t_, but it felt like she might be headed that way if she let herself.

And then she heard the crying.

Lucy shot to her feet. “Amy!?”

She ran down the hallway, following the sound as it grew steadily louder. As it did so, she realized it wasn’t a woman crying, but a man.

“Hello? Sir?” She reached what she thought was the door, knocking on it. “Please, please answer me, please tell me I’m not alone, sir, hello?”

The crying stopped, and for a horrible moment Lucy thought that she really was alone. That she had imagined all of this, and that she was left with nothing but her swiftly slipping mind.

From the other side of the door came a whispered, “Hello?”

Lucy sobbed in relief. “Hello! My name is Lucy Preston, I’ve been trapped here for—I don’t know how long.”

There was the sound of movement, the creaking of a bed, and then the voice was louder, right on the other side of the door. “Miss Preston, I’m—my name is Wyatt Logan.”

Lucy pressed her ear and her palm to the door. “I’ve seen no one, heard no one, I’ve been all alone.”

“You’re the first woman I’ve heard who wasn’t a member of the staff,” Wyatt Logan replied. “Are you all right?”

“Do I sound all right!?” Lucy demanded, her voice cracking and rising to a hysterical pitch.

“…my apologies,” Wyatt Logan said. “Uh. I’m not good at talking to people. Or that’s what Rufus says, anyway. Rufus is another patient here. Someone put him here against his will, too, you’re not alone.”

“I feel so alone. Everyone’s left me. My sister is gone and nobody will believe me when I say she exists. They say I’m insane. My mother left me here. My friends never visit.”

“I’m here,” Wyatt promised her. “We’re stuck in here together.”

“You were crying,” Lucy noted. “Why?”

“I…” Wyatt sounded thrown. “I thought I saw… things.”

“Shadows?”

“Yeah. Shadows that were alive. And my wife. She died and I was seeing her but she was—wrong. Her face was—_God_.” Wyatt’s voice dropped, going soft and horrified.

“I’m here,” Lucy said, repeating Wyatt’s words from a moment ago. “I’m here. It’s all right. I’m here.”

“Miss Preston!”

Lucy jumped and she heard Wyatt say, “what was that!?” as she whipped around.

A woman was standing there, a few years younger than Lucy, with dark deer eyes and light brown skin.

“It’s all right,” the woman said. “But you shouldn’t be out at night. It’s not safe.”

“I noticed,” Lucy replied, her voice strangled.

“Is that Jiya?” Wyatt asked. “Jiya!”

Jiya looked rather put out. “Mr. Logan. How nice of you to add your thoughts.”

“What’s going on?” Lucy demanded. “Why—what is going on with this place—”

“How did you even get out of your room?”

Lucy held up her metal comb.

Jiya sighed. “You must be careful. Please.”

A suspicion grew in Lucy’s mind. “You’re the one giving me the sugar pills, aren’t you?”

“Sugar pills?” Wyatt asked.

“I’m doing what I can,” Jiya rebutted. “You’re only putting yourself and all of us in danger by wandering around at night. Mr. Logan trusts me. Can you trust me? Please? Stay in your room.”

“I won’t be alone.”

“She shouldn’t be alone,” Wyatt echoed.

Jiya looked like she might want to shove some decidedly _not _sugar pills down Wyatt Logan’s throat. “I will try and see about getting you meetings with the others. Some community time.”

“Jiya!” Wyatt added. “Why aren’t you talking to Rufus anymore? You’re ignoring him, we can tell!”

Jiya ignored Wyatt. “Come with me, Miss Preston, I’ll take you to your room.”

“I’ll come back,” Lucy said to Wyatt. Now that she was talking to people she realized how painful it had been to be all alone with nothing but the darkness and her own thoughts.

Jiya gently took her elbow. “Come along, Miss Preston,” she said, only this time her voice was soft.

Lucy let herself be led, clinging to Jiya as the woman led her through the darkness, hating that she felt less and less alive, and more and more like a shadow herself, the farther away from Wyatt she got.

* * *

To Flynn’s surprise, he met another person.

Jiya brought him into the room where he had met Stiv, only to find a woman was sitting there by the window, staring out at the bare courtyard. She had thick dark hair messily framing her angular face and large, dark eyes.

Flynn’s heart did an odd flip.

“Miss Preston,” Jiya said, “this is Mr. Flynn. Mr. Flynn, this is Miss Preston. I’ll bring you both some water.”

The room had a chess board, a backgammon board, and a few old books scattered around. Flynn seated himself near Miss Preston, who was watching him like he might shift into something menacing.

“Are you here because you want to be?” Miss Preston asked. She sounded scared, like she wasn’t sure how to use her voice anymore.

“No. Why are you here?”

Miss Preston swallowed. “May I?”

Flynn wasn’t sure what she was asking but he nodded, and Miss Preston reached out, taking his hand and gently squeezing it. Flynn noticed her fingers were covered in still-healing cuts and there were bruises on her wrists, like from leather restraints.

_There’s a girl they tie down who screams for her sister,_ Jiya had said.

Was this that person?

“I had to make sure,” Miss Preston whispered.

“Are you the one who—who lost her sister?” Flynn dared to ask.

Miss Preston’s eyes went wide. “How did you know that?”

“Jiya told me.”

“Jiya gives me sugar pills,” Miss Preston confessed. “She told me it’s not safe to go out at night.”

Flynn nodded. “There’s something wrong here. My friend hasn’t been able to see me. And the walls sound like…”

“…like they’re breathing, or like there’s something trapped inside,” Miss Preston finished.

“Yes.”

Miss Preston looked out the window. “I had a sister. Amy Preston. I know I had her. But she disappeared and now everyone, including my mother, claims she doesn’t exist. That she never did. And then—then my mother put me in here.” She blinked, her eyes wet, and Flynn’s heart clenched. “All I know is that it was after one of mother’s little… Rittenhouse meetings… and then Amy was gone, and nobody will tell me anything…”

Flynn felt like he might fall to the floor, going so lightheaded the room spun—but that might be the fact that he was still only eating once a day. Miss Preston looked rather gaunt herself. “Miss Preston—”

“Lucy.”

“Rather forward, wouldn’t you say?”

“You’re the first person whose face I’ve seen in weeks besides Jiya. You’re the second person I’ve spoken to, and the first person I had to run through the entire building to find. I had to speak to him through a door, and then Jiya made me leave him. I don’t care for—for manners or formalities.” Lucy grew more impassioned as she spoke. “I wasn’t mad when I was brought here but now I feel as though I actually am going mad and I am so—so greedy for human touch, for speech, for—for anything, I want to hear someone say my _name_.”

“Lucy,” Flynn blurted out, the distress in her voice rising to a fever pitch. “Lucy, Lucy, Lucy.”

Lucy seized his hand again, and this time she didn’t let go, shaking, and Flynn gently rotated his hand so that he could hold onto her in return, trying to steady her.

“My apologies, Mr. Flynn,” she whispered, wiping at her eyes. “Jiya keeps telling me to be strong and that it will be all right but I don’t feel very strong at all.”

“Call me Garcia.” The last person to do that had been Lorena. It had been a long time, he realized, since anyone had said his first name, either.

“Garcia,” Lucy repeated.

His name sounded lovely in her mouth.

“I think you’re very strong,” Flynn promised her. “Something’s wrong here. I’ve known it from the moment they brought me here. I looked into something called Rittenhouse, too, and I was put here. They killed my wife and daughter and framed me for it.”

Lucy inhaled sharply, growing pale. “Do you think… Amy…”

“I don’t know. But if we both know that name, and we’re both trapped in here, that can’t be a coincidence.”

“The other person, Wyatt, he lost someone too,” Lucy said. “His wife. And there’s another person in here named… Rufus. Do you think…?”

“I wouldn’t dismiss anything at this juncture,” Flynn admitted. He had so many questions, and no answers, and felt truly powerless for the first time in his life. It was painful, like a hook in his chest, constantly tugging. “But we’re not going to figure anything out right now. Tell me—tell me about Amy.”

Lucy looked up at him, and he could see the shock on her face. When was the last time anyone had asked her about her sister?

“She would soak her hair in this mixture that would help her hair,” she started. “When—when she would get nightmares she would crawl into bed with me, and I’d hold her, and her hair smelled like strawberries. All night I would dream of them.”

Lucy squeezed his hand. “Tell me about your wife and your daughter.”

When Jiya came to fetch them, it felt like no time had passed. Flynn realized, dazedly, that they had been holding hands the entire time. Showed how starving they both were for touch and connection.

Lucy looked scared as Jiya approached. _Please don’t, _her face clearly said, and Flynn wanted to put himself between her and anything or anyone who made Lucy look like that.

“You’ll get to see him again,” Jiya promised. “Mr. Flynn, I’ve arranged to… to put you near the other two men. I told them that you’ll be easier to manage if you’re all together. Don’t make me regret this.”

“You’re doing a lot for us, Jiya,” Flynn acknowledged. “Thank you.”

Jiya nodded. “I just hope it works out,” she said, as if she had seen it not working out and was not keen for that to come to pass.

Flynn looked at Lucy, who was still holding onto his hand. “I’ll see you again.”

Lucy released him but watched the entire time as Jiya led him out. Now that they were separated, the shadows felt stronger, more present.

“Your next door neighbor is Wyatt Logan,” Jiya told him. She led Flynn to a new room. “If you’re careful, I think you can hear each other through the walls. If you wish to speak to each other.” She paused as Flynn took in the space. It was the same as his last room, and he had a sudden, dizzy feeling of a labyrinth, of rooms upon rooms that all looked the same, unable to tell where he was going or where he’d been. “Try not to be too loud. If Cahill or Whitmore hear you then it’ll be all our heads.”

Flynn gave her the same sort of look he would give Iris when Iris had done something like played in the chimney again and gotten soot all over the floor, and was trying to hide it. “Jiya… what is going on here? What do you know?”

Jiya gave him a look that was surprisingly sad. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

She slipped out, closing the door behind her, before Flynn could say anything more.

It took him a moment to realize Jiya hadn’t locked the door.

Was that on purpose? Or by design?

A banging started up on one side of the wall. “Hey, hey! Is someone there? Jiya is that you? Lucy?” The voice turned incredibly hopeful. “Lucy?”

“You know Lucy?” Flynn asked.

“Yeah, she’s the only person I’ve met besides Rufus and Jiya.”

“Who’s Rufus?”

“Another guy—what, are you new here?”

“I’m not fucking new here, fuck off. I’ve been kept in isolation. I’m Garcia Flynn.”

There was a rather pregnant pause, and then the voice said, “Aren’t you the one in the papers who cut up his fam—”

“I didn’t kill them,” Flynn roared with a sudden anger he hadn’t realized was still banking inside of him.

“…wow, okay, so you didn’t kill them, yeah. Picture of calm and compassion, you are,” the voice retorted.

“And who are you, some asshole who was so insufferable his family locked him away in here?” It was rather cruel, but Flynn wasn’t in the mood when he was yet again being told, by some random nobody whose face he couldn’t even see, that he had murdered his family.

“I’m Wyatt Logan, and joke’s on you, I have no family. Except Jessica. Jess. My wife. But she’s dead. Or I’m supposed to think she is. But I keep seeing her. I don’t know.”

“You should see a doctor about that,” Flynn said, deadpan.

“Fuck you, asshole.”

“Fuck me yourself, coward.”

There was another long pause on the other end, and then Wyatt said, “Kind of hard to do that with a wall in the way, wouldn’t you say?”

Flynn laughed, surprised. “No Oscar Wilde jokes?”

“I’m in an insane asylum, I think any concerns of the Wilde variety are the least of my problems, wouldn’t you say? I’m literally losing my sanity.”

“That makes two of us. You—you said you…” Flynn wet his lips. “You said you know Lucy. Lucy Preston?”

“Yeah. She—she heard me crying, uh.” Wyatt sounded embarrassed and cleared his throat. “She came and comforted me. She comes every so often. When she can. I don’t know how she gets out of her cell.”

Flynn tried the door of his and found it unlocked, as he suspected. “Perhaps Jiya never locked it.”

“Did she lock yours?”

“No.”

There was silence, and then he heard Wyatt say, “Oh well just fuck me I guess,” and a moment later he heard a knock at his door.

He opened it and found a dark blond man standing there, looking as gaunt and exhausted as Flynn felt.

“I never thought to check my door,” Wyatt said sheepishly.

Flynn reached out and carefully felt along Wyatt’s shoulder. He would have felt embarrassed, but Wyatt reached up and clasped Flynn’s hand, as if he was feeling the same way.

“Come in,” Flynn said gruffly. “Hopefully Lucy will show up but… if not I suppose I’m better than nothing.”

Lucy didn’t show up that night, but she did the next night. She sounded delighted that Flynn and Wyatt were in one place, but Jiya had locked their rooms that time and Flynn refused to let Lucy try and pick the locks after she mentioned how it made her fingers bleed. Jiya didn’t always lock the doors, but she did enough times, for some reason that Flynn couldn’t fathom.

But it was better than nothing, at least, to have Lucy’s voice. To have Wyatt’s voice, and his face when they could manage. There was no more talk of Wilde, but Wyatt didn’t seem to object if Flynn sometimes ruffled his hair or touched his shoulder. He spoke a lot of Jess.

He also had nightmares.

Flynn didn’t have nightmares. It was the avoidance of the pills, and then taking sugar pills, but Wyatt used to have them before Jiya put him on sugar pills too. He suspected Lucy’d had nightmares too, but hers seemed to sometimes happen even with the sugar pills and so far, Flynn couldn’t figure out why. Lucy’s psyche seemed the most fragile of all, and at times it was all he could do not to try and tear the whole place apart stone by stone to find her and make sure she was taken out of there before she did a harm to herself.

But tonight, Wyatt had a nightmare—one where he was crying out, half in horror, half in longing.

“No! Stay, stay, stay, Jess, Jessica, stay—why are you here _why are you here_ you’re not _real_—”

Flynn got up. “Wyatt?”

He heard—a voice. Not Wyatt’s. A woman’s. She was telling Wyatt to hush and to forget her and move on.

“Get out of here,” the voice said. “Shh, shh, get out of here, you’ll be safe if you forget me, all right?”

“Do you love me?” Wyatt sounded miserable.

“_Yes_.” The woman sounded equally so.

“Then come _home_.”

“I can’t. I have another family I have to help.”

“_I’m _your family, Jess—”

Flynn heard a door open.

But that couldn’t be right, if this was a nightmare, how could he…

He got up and strode across the room, silent as a cat, easing open his door.

Wyatt had never described Jess, at least not in physical features, only in qualities. He had spoken of her sharp wit, her determination, her love of Keats.

But slipping out of Wyatt’s room, Flynn saw a blonde woman with a pert nose and a heart-shaped face, holding a lantern that seemed to make the shadows around her not so much dissipate as shrink back.

His heart leaping into his mouth, Flynn watched the woman start to walk away.

The door was wrenched open, and Wyatt stumbled out. “Jess!” he screamed.

The woman disappeared around the corner. She did not look back.

“Wyatt,” Flynn whispered. “Is Jess blonde? With a slightly upturned nose?”

Wyatt stared at him, eyes truly wild. “You saw her?”

“Yes.”

“But—but she’s dead, she’s—I checked myself in here because she’s _dead _and I’m seeing her—”

Flynn stepped out into the hallway. “I don’t know what’s going on, Wyatt, but Jess isn’t dead. I saw her. She went that way.”

He should have known it was coming, but he was still surprised when Wyatt’s breathing got quick and panicky, he let out a reedy sort of gasp, and then took off down the hallway after the woman.

God damn it.

“Wyatt, no!” Flynn yelled, but it was too late.

Wyatt was running into the darkness.

* * *

Wyatt hurried on, ignoring Flynn’s attempts to slow him down as he tore through the corridors. She was _real_. Flynn had seen her too, and Flynn was a mental patient in an asylum, sure, but there was no way that he could see Jessica Logan unless she was real—not down to the details of her face. He had no way of knowing her or simply guessing. And he struck Wyatt as sane enough. Annoyingly sane, in fact. If anything he seemed liable to drive Wyatt mad, with the strange way he looked at Wyatt as if he was stripping Wyatt down to his bare essentials.

Staring at Flynn felt like standing too near a warm fire after a long day out in the cold.

“Jess!” he yelled, his voice reverberating against and through the walls. “Jessica!”

She was right there, she _had _been right there, and if only he could run fast enough…

Wyatt turned the corner and found himself confronted by a mass of shadows.

Behind him, Flynn came to a halt so abrupt that he crashed into Wyatt’s back, making both of them stumble.

The shadows writhed in front of them, strange whispers filling the air. Wyatt could’ve sworn he felt the walls beating like a heart. Or fists against the walls. Souls trapped inside.

Wyatt stared ahead, and thought he could see things in the writhing mass, things he couldn’t even begin to describe, the words for them slipping away from his mouth as soon as he tried, but nevertheless terrified him. He reached back, grabbing onto Flynn, who yanked Wyatt back as the shadows started to move towards them en masse. “Run,” Flynn croaked. “Wyatt, run!”

They tore back down the corridor, blind, up steps, down steps, the shadows all around them, choking Wyatt like he could feel hands tearing at him, trying to yank him back. He held onto Flynn for all he was worth as they hurried through, until something, some_thing_, got a hold of him and yanked at his limbs and he could feel the bruises forming with the strength of them.

Wyatt felt himself being torn away from Flynn and dragged back towards the shadows, and he screamed, screamed as he hadn’t since he was just a boy in the war, far too young to be involved in death, especially the kind of death that involved mud and guts and blood and vomit—Flynn grabbed at him—and managed to yank him back just as he felt something start to try and slide around his neck and _into his mouth and eyes—_

Flynn held onto him and got him to his feet, pulling Wyatt into a pool of light from one of the few lanterns that lit up the corridor. Wyatt was shaking and when he looked down, he saw that there were bruises and cuts on him, like from manacles, or something else, he couldn’t even say.

“What is that,” he whispered frantically. “Flynn, Flynn, what was that!?”

Flynn pulled him in, murmuring something soothing in a language Wyatt didn’t understand, a strangely melodic language, and then Wyatt heard someone else cry out, “Wyatt? Garcia?”

Wyatt spun towards the voice. “Lucy!” he yelled. Tears of relief sprang into his eyes. “Lucy!”

A door opened and he ran for it with Flynn, trying to dodge the shadows, and they were being pulled in, the door shut and secured behind them.

Wyatt collapsed onto the bed as Flynn fell to his knees, the both of them shaking. Lucy patted Flynn all over, then Wyatt, clucking her tongue and fetching water and a cloth from her bowl, patting Wyatt’s cuts. He wondered when he had started bleeding.

Lucy herself was—she was beautiful. Pale, and wane, the bones of her face starting to stand out from a lack of food and her hair and eyes a bit wild, but still. She looked like she ought to have been on stage. She reminded Wyatt a little of the poor doomed Sibyl in _The Picture of Dorian Gray_, someone too beautiful, alive, and feeling to truly be real. And yet in this place, this horrible place—she, like Flynn, felt more real than anything else, than his own sanity.

“The shadows, they’re alive,” Flynn croaked.

“I’ve gone out at night,” Lucy noted, whispering. “But they’ve never attacked me. Just watched me.”

“What are they?” Wyatt asked, still shaking. He would rather be back in bloody Kansas or Texas rather than stay here a second longer. “Jess, she’s real, she’s still alive, Flynn saw her too—did the shadows—did they swallow her?”

“I don’t know,” Lucy protested. “I don’t know anything, Wyatt, I’m sorry.”

“We have to figure out what’s going on,” Flynn said. “The shadows, they got worse as we stared to head down the corridor the floor below yours, Lucy. I think there’s something there they don’t want us to see.”

“So, what, the shadows can think now?” Wyatt protested weakly.

Flynn, to his surprise, didn’t snap back. He just pressed his hand over Wyatt’s chest, steadying him. “This used to help my friend,” he said quietly, by way of explanation. “When he panicked.”

Wyatt clutched Flynn’s wrist, letting the weight and steadiness of Flynn’s hand calm him.

“I fashioned my comb into a bit of a—a lockpick, if you will,” Lucy admitted, holding up the object in question. “I could try and unlock the doctor’s offices, see what I could find. They’re not here at night and the shadows don’t attack me.”

Flynn didn’t look too happy about the idea of Lucy going on her own at night, and Wyatt didn’t like it all that much either, but she had a point. If she had been safe all this time, and he and Flynn had been attacked their one time out, maybe there was something to letting her go alone.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” Flynn asked Lucy quietly.

Lucy reached for his hand and Flynn watched, entranced, as she interlocked their fingers. Like she was a marvel, a world wonder.

“I’m better with you two here,” Lucy replied. She laid her hand over Flynn’s on Wyatt’s chest, looking at him. “Are you feeling better, Wyatt?”

He nodded, sitting up properly, still holding onto Flynn’s wrist. For a moment, despite all the rest that was going on, he didn’t want to leave this moment, staring at the two of them, their hands all almost but not quite interlocked, Lucy’s dark brown eyes and Flynn’s indecipherable ones both gently fixed on him.

“Stay here tonight,” Lucy said. “You obviously can’t go back.”

Wyatt looked down at the bed. A concrete floor wasn’t ideal, but it was better than venturing out of this room. “All right.” He looked at Flynn.

Flynn stood up and prompted Wyatt to move, then heaved the thin mattress off the bed frame and onto the floor. “If I’d known we would be sleeping over, I would have brought our blankets,” Flynn joked, the first time Wyatt had heard him crack any kind of joke in the time he’d known him—which was, admittedly, short.

Wyatt saw at once what Flynn was doing. It wasn’t about comfort. Even as Lucy crawled into the middle and tugged at Wyatt to curl around her front so that Flynn could awkwardly drape himself over her from behind, he saw at once that Flynn was mostly on the floor, and that Wyatt himself was only on the mattress by virtue of Lucy all but sleeping on top of him. He had to hold onto Flynn rather fiercely to keep Flynn connected to them.

But it wasn’t about that. It was about being connected. After weeks of nothing, only the barest of human connection, they were now all tangled together. Flynn had situated the mattress so that his back was against the wall, ensuring he would remain pressed against the other two of them. Wyatt felt warmer now than he had in weeks.

Lucy carefully draped her blankets over them. At least they were provided with that small mercy, just enough blankets to keep them from freezing alone in their rooms at night. Now, with the combined body heat, the blankets served them well, kept them properly toasty.

“We’ll find out what’s happening,” Lucy whispered. Wyatt believed her when she said that.

He missed Jess, missed her with a fierce and powerful ache. But, burying his face in Lucy’s hair, feeling Flynn hold onto him, he felt that ache start to subside, just a bit, like broken bones knitting back together.

Maybe it was just their meeting in such odd and intense circumstances. But despite only knowing these people a short time, and not seeing them much or properly that whole while, he was terrified to lose them. They were the only ones who could understand what was happening, after all—them and Rufus, and Jiya.

Would finding out what was happening be the thing that saved them? Or would it destroy them?

Wyatt clung to the both of them and prayed it was the former.

* * *

To say Rufus was surprised when Jiya arrived with his food was an understatement. That annoying Dr. Whitmore or the night guard had been delivering his meals as of late, as a part of Jiya’s concentrated efforts to ignore him despite continuing to arrange for him to spend time with Lucy, Flynn, or Wyatt for an hour or so during the day.

“You decided I exist again, huh?”

Jiya looked abashed as she set his tray down. “I… I’m sorry. I wanted to ask, only—is your patron, your mentor, has he arranged to get you out?”

She sounded like she knew the answer before she even asked the question. Rufus sighed. “No. No, he hasn’t. And frankly at this point I’m not sure he will.” He hated to give up on Mason but… it had been weeks. A month, perhaps. Time was funny here. Or at least his perception of it. Given that they weren’t shown any calendars or clocks he supposed that wasn’t all that surprising. Part of his scientific work was on the idea of time and he was well aware that there was a certain element of relativity to it.

Knowing things intellectually didn’t stop them from affecting him, though. Knowing that Dr. Cahill and Dr. Whitmore were starving him and the others out didn’t stop him from having hunger pangs any more than knowing a pill had hallucinogens in it stopped him from hallucinating.

Jiya looked troubled. “I could… I could go and speak with him. He’s Mr. Mason, you said, the investor? And inventor?”

“Mason is a lot of things. I thought, including, my friend. My… family. But.” Rufus shrugged, and took his tray of food, picking at it. Ah, unappetizing mush yet again. Wonderful. “You live and you learn. It’s been weeks and he could’ve had me out of here in a few days if he really wanted to.”

Jiya got a stubborn look about her. Then she went unexpectedly soft and said, “I didn’t want to ignore you.”

“Oh? You’ve been doing a great job of it.”

“Could you, perchance, stop being an absolute knob for two minutes so I can explain?” Jiya sat down next to him and the warmth of her was so startling that Rufus nearly jumped up and knocked his tray over. “I… I see things. Things that haven’t happened yet, but still happen. I see things that aren’t there.”

“…like what.” Before, Rufus might not have believed her, but after days upon days of wondering why it felt like the shadows were spying on him, he was inclined to take a leap of faith. Ironic, given his doubts about God and all that related stuff.

Jiya gestured around them. “The shadows here, they seem alive, don’t they?”

Rufus nodded.

“They are. You see shadows. I see… what they really are.”

“And what are they?”

A look of unspeakable disgust and fear crossed over Jiya’s face. “Forbidden colors. Forbidden things. Like when you read stories like… like _The Castle of Otranto _and stories like that, you know, where the writer talks about the things you can’t see and it’s, somehow the talk avoiding explaining the thing makes it worse? Or in—in _Frankenstein_, by Shelley, how she describes the creature as horribly beautiful, and he looks unnatural and you can’t stop staring at him because you’re trying to make sense of him? Like—like that. You can’t bear to look, because looking is so horrible, and then you do look, and you can’t look away because your mind is struggling to understand, and either way, you can’t find the words, and that makes it somehow more horrible than anything. The unspeakableness of it.”

“It sounds lonely,” Rufus said. “Seeing that when nobody else can.”

Jiya seemed startled. “I—yes. It is, rather.” She looked at Rufus’s hands, at his throat, at everywhere, he realized, except his eyes. “I saw—things, I see things, and so I know parts of what is happening. Or going to happen. It’s how I knew to help you all. Give you sugar pills. But I also saw—I didn’t want to give into—we spent so many days talking.”

“You were the only person I saw besides Dr. Cahill and Dr. Whitmore. We had good talks.”

Jiya smiled bashfully, an emotion Rufus hadn’t thought he’d ever see in her. “Yes. And I loved it. But then I…” The smile slid from her face. “I saw you dying. Horribly. And I was so scared—I don’t—I don’t have anyone, Rufus. My father died and my mother went back home, to Lebanon. I took this job because I have nothing else. And then you came. Do you understand? You came here and you are the most alive person I’ve ever met and the idea that you die and it might be, somehow, because of me—and I thought maybe if I stopped talking to you that I could—that the pain would be less but it’s—it’s too late.”

“Too late? What, am I going to die no matter what?”

“No.” Jiya swallowed and finally looked him in the eyes. “Too late for it not to hurt if I lost you.”

Rufus had never exactly been what one would call ‘bold’ with women. Mason had often despaired when he had taken Rufus to parties, although Rufus thought Mason was hardly one to judge, seeing as Mason had never so much as thought about sending anyone flowers never mind pursuing someone’s hand in marriage. But if he couldn’t be bold now, with Jiya laying her heart at his feet, in this place where he might not even get out alive and there was nobody to judge him and there was something big and terrible after him, and the rules of the world no longer made sense—

If he couldn’t be bold now, then when could he?

He leaned forward, took Jiya’s face gently in his hands, and kissed her.

The tray of food did end up falling to the floor.

Neither of them noticed.

* * *

Jiya shuffled nervously as she rang the doorbell yet again. Connor Mason lived in a much nicer area of Boston than that to which she was accustomed, and even wearing her nicest dress and the hat her mother had bought her for her birthday last year, she felt incredibly out of place, a sparrow sporting peacock feathers.

At least it was better out here, though, in the fresh air. Away from the asylum.

The door was at last opened by a butler of some kind. Jiya cleared her throat. “I need to speak with Connor Mason, please? It’s about Rufus Carlin.”

The butler looked at her for a moment like she was a stain on the floor and seemed about ready to close the door in her face when from behind him, Jiya heard, “Let her in, Anthony.”

The butler, Anthony, stepped back and Jiya entered to see Connor Mason standing in the doorway of what appeared to be the sitting room. “And you are?” he asked.

He looked dignified, Jiya could give him that. Perhaps it was the lack of hair and the British accent that made it seem that way. It was comforting, in a way, to see a man with dark skin rise to such a prominent place in society, but Jiya wasn’t inclined to be generous towards Connor Mason. Not after she had seen Rufus steadily losing hope.

“My name is Jiya. I’m a nurse at Usher Asylum.”

She saw the flicker in Mason’s eyes and pressed forward. “You know of it? You know Rufus is there, you know he doesn’t deserve to be there, you know—”

Mason held up a hand. “Tea, I think, Anthony. In the library.”

Tea? She didn’t want _tea_. “I don’t want your formalities, Mr. Mason, I want you to remember your promise to Rufus.”

“In the library,” Mason repeated in the tone of a man who is used to being obeyed instantly.

Jiya sullenly followed him, and pointedly did not sip at her tea when it was set beside her. It was a nice library. Plenty of books on all sorts of subjects. Rufus must have loved this room.

“I should’ve known that Rufus would be capable of making friends just about anywhere,” Mason noted, sipping at his own tea calmly. “Jiya, I appreciate your loyalty in coming here to inquire after him. But I cannot get Rufus released. Not yet, anyway.”

“And why not? Because you’re a coward? Because you won’t go against your rich friends?”

“Rich and powerful friends,” Mason warned her. “More powerful than you know. Drink up.”

Jiya did not drink the tea. Mason sighed. “You’ll want something to settle your stomach.”

“Why?”

Mason set down his teacup. “Believe it or not, but my refusal to get Rufus out of that ghastly place is to protect him. If he’s in there, Rittenhouse—they’re a group of unpleasantly rich and powerful people who would like to be even more powerful—will consider him dealt with and leave him alone. He was asking too many questions and I knew it would only be a matter of time until he found out the truth. Rufus has always been inquisitive that way. And if he did—Rittenhouse would deal with him, just as they’ve dealt with others.”

“What are they planning?” Maybe she did need a sip of tea after all.

“They want to… to summon something,” Mason said, and she could tell that he was dodging the question. “Something evil. They want power over—well, everything, and if God or Satan will not give it to them, they think they know something that will.”

_Rufus is dead, his eyes wide with terror but carrying that horrible glassy sheen. Something is casting a huge shadow over him, something she can’t dare look at directly, something huge, massive, wriggling—_

Jiya blinked. Shuddered. Took another sip of tea. “What… what others did they deal with? Could it be… an Amy Preston and a Garcia Flynn?”

Mason blinked rapidly in surprise. “Why, yes, actually. I don’t know the details about Miss Preston. That was a family matter. I suspect it was not so much what she knew as—other things. But the less you know the better.”

“Like Hell,” Jiya said, startling even herself. “There are four people trapped in that asylum, and they’re all being forced to go mad. I see what they’re doing to them! Strapping Lucy Preston down until she’s bruised, feeding them pills that make them hallucinate and have fevers, feeding them barely enough to keep them alive. None of them were insane going in there but Lucy’s close to the breaking point and the others won’t be far behind her!”

Mason went a little pale. “It could be that… that I was mistaken in their plans.”

“What do you mean?”

“I foolishly let myself be drawn in by them, until by the time I knew the truth it was too late to back out. I—they promised me that if Rufus was put out of the way, that it would be all right. He would be released once their plans were fulfilled and it was no matter if anyone knew about Rittenhouse. But—but what you’re saying sounds like they’re—they’re preparing them.”

“Preparing them?” Jiya felt sick. “For what?”

Mason took a deep, bracing gulp of tea. “The thing they’re summoning, you can’t see it and—and survive. Mentally. You go—insane. And it needs—souls to feed on to gain enough strength to—to stay here. So they’re weakening them…”

Jiya really did need that tea now. “Mr. Mason, we have to get them out of there. We must.”

Mason shook his head. “My dear girl, if they’re already in there, then it’s too late.”

* * *

It took several tries, but at last she was able to use her metal comb to lockpick the office of Dr. Whitmore.

Lucy stumbled into the room, cursing under her breath as she wiped her bleeding fingers on her skirt. The shadows seemed to lengthen hungrily at the scent of her blood. Was it just her imagination, or was it as if the shadows were coalescing into something, one single creature?

The office itself was rather bare. As if it was not often used. There were no papers on the desk, but there were drawers on it. Lucy opened the top one first.

Patient notes. Nothing interesting there.

The drawer on the right held papers torn out of books and from newspaper clippings. They were an odd collection. Tales of séances. Ghosts. Articles about people claiming to have seen unusual things. But then also recordings of the stock market. The state of politics in Europe. Speeches by Booker T. Washington and Susan B. Anthony.

Odd.

The middle drawer on the right, however—that one held patient records.

Lucy drew them out.

It felt oddly like treason to look at the records of the others without them here, without them consenting, but she might never get another chance.

_Lucy Preston – Carolyn says that it must be baptism by fire. That Lucy will accept her chance for greatness when it comes if only she can be made to see how strong she is. She must be broken to be reborn, better._

What sort of… of nonsense…

_Garcia Flynn – we have taken care of his wife and daughter in a most gruesome fashion but his resolve is still strong. He is a harder man to break than we gave him credit for. I almost respect him for it. Despite all attempts he remains unbowed. I am speaking with Carolyn and Benjamin to see if we cannot simply be rid of him and substitute another in his place as a sacrifice, but there must be five and I fear that we are running out of time for a suitable replacement._

There must be five? What was going to happen, what sort of sacrifice required five people? And who were the others?

_Wyatt Logan – I suppose his guilt over Jess is somewhat admirable, like watching a dog cross the city to try and get back to its owner. If only he had shown such loyalty and consideration while he still had the chance. No matter. Jess remains loyal to us. Neither of them will be fit to stand in the way._

Jessica—Jessica Logan _was _alive. Wyatt wasn’t insane. Loyal to them, though? Why? What for?

_Rufus Carlin – a worthy intellectual adversary. I quite like him. Pity he must be one of the five. Note: I suspect Jiya has a soft spot for him. Perhaps she might take Flynn’s place and we can be rid of him? She knows too much as it is._

Lucy’s blood went cold.

Rufus. Flynn. Wyatt. That made three. She suspected, from the notes, that she was not to be a sacrifice. But what other two were there?

Perhaps… Jess? And…

…Amy.

Lucy slipped the records back into their place, wishing like anything that she had some way to record copies to show the others. They were all in danger, even Jiya, and while she didn’t know the deadline, she did know that time was running out.

* * *

“I don’t like this idea, for the record,” Wyatt said as he followed Flynn through the corridors.

“Thank you for stating it for the record,” Flynn replied, focusing on what lay ahead, “it has been noted.”

“The last time we were here,” Wyatt pressed on, sticking so close to Flynn they might as well have been holding hands, “we nearly died, remember that? The shadows tried to kill us?”

“We were getting close to something,” Flynn replied. “Something they didn’t like. It’s early enough in the evening, they’re not as powerful yet.”

“And you know this, how?”

Flynn looked back at Wyatt, who did honestly look terrified, practically a ghost with how pale he was. “If there’s one thing I know, it’s how to sneak past an enemy.”

He offered his arm, half in jest, thinking Wyatt would scoff and refuse it—but to his surprise Wyatt linked their arms, looking about them like a shadow really would wrap around his ankle and take a bite out of him.

Actually, that idea wasn’t too far out of the realm of possibility.

They moved forward, sticking to the light, until they got to the end of the hallway. No wonder Lucy was suffering the most. The shadows seemed thickest here, the feeling of something in the walls like a beating heart feeling like a low, constant drumbeat. Whatever was going on here, this was close to the source.

Flynn felt along the wall at the end of the hall, pressing at the stones. This was the first floor, right below where Lucy was alone in her wing on the second. If he pressed… just so…

The wall swung inward, revealing a crudely carved out, sloping path downward. Damp clung to the walls and the whole thing smelled unpleasantly of earth. Flynn had grown up in a town surrounded by nature, and could recall rolling around in the grass with Matej, his childhood best friend (his first love, if he was being honest, and he hadn’t been honest in time so what did it matter), smelling the earth there and thinking it smelled like life.

This didn’t smell like life. This smelled like decay. Like rot.

“Should we go in?” Wyatt whispered.

Flynn glanced behind them, almost certain he would see someone, or rather something, watching them. But despite the prickling at the back of his neck, there was nothing there. Just the darkness of the corridor.

“Yes.”

Wyatt looked at Flynn like Flynn had just proposed they juggle knives for fun. Flynn shrugged in return. “What do we have to lose, Wyatt?”

“Our lives?”

“What lives. My family is dead. Murdered. By these people. And you—your wife is dead, but we both saw her. Obviously something is going on. What do either of us have to go back to? If I die, I want to die having answers and I want to die knowing I tried to avenge my family and expose the truth.”

Wyatt looked at him for a moment, as if he had never seen Flynn before, or never seen him properly. Flynn thought Wyatt might pull away, but then Wyatt hooked his arm tighter around Flynn’s. “Just don’t let me get fucking lost down there, all right?”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Flynn replied dryly, and he began to enter the tunnel.

Wyatt demonstrated a remarkable ability to become part octopus, holding onto Flynn’s arm so tightly that Flynn was certain Wyatt would leave bruises. “Aren’t you a soldier?” he whispered.

“This ain’t war,” Wyatt shot back. “Show me any war where shit like this happens.”

Fair enough. Flynn had been in his fair share, more than Wyatt had, actually, and he had never seen anything like this, either.

The darkness swallowed them whole as they ventured further down into the tunnel, and Flynn was grateful for his height (for once) as he was able to reach up and keep his hand running along the ceiling as he walked. Wyatt was to his left, stretching his arm out to feel his hand along the wall to their left.

“What the hell do you suppose this is for?” Wyatt whispered.

Flynn flinched at the noise. The earth around them was keeping all the noise in, stifling them, and he couldn’t quite shake the feeling that the air was being stolen from them, even though he knew logically that he could breathe just fine. Someone was using this tunnel for something—regularly, judging by how tramped-down the dirt floor was. They weren’t going to suffocate down here.

“Getting in and out without being seen.” Flynn paused. “There might have been other patients here, once. Maybe this was how they moved them out to use them for… whatever they’ll use us for, without anyone noticing.”

“Nobody notices anyway.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure. A mental patient kicking up a fuss, especially a potentially violent one, that’s always a _cause célèbre_. I wouldn’t risk it if I were the doctors.”

The tunnel began to slope upwards and Flynn nearly banged his head on the wall. Clearly this tunnel was not made for anyone over six feet in height—although he could hardly blame the builder. His height was unusual and constructing an underground tunnel was difficult enough on its own.

“If they even think about cutting up my damn brain,” Wyatt muttered, and then he slammed into something and went, “mother_fuck_!”

“Be quiet!” Flynn hissed.

“I just ran into a door, you’d yell too.”

Flynn reached out blindly, groping until he found Wyatt’s shoulder and then followed that up to his face, gently feeling Wyatt’s nose. “It’s not broken.”

“It’s bleeding.”

Sure enough, Flynn’s fingers felt wet. “You’ll live.”

He pulled away and felt the door. It was solid, thick wood of some kind. It took a bit of searching, but he was able to find a handle and push upwards. The door seemed to be at some kind of angle, and Flynn struggled to open it quietly once gravity kicked in and it began to fall downward.

Now that he could see again, he had to blink a few times to adjust. It was a dimly lit room, thank God, so he wasn’t blinded. Next to him he could see Wyatt once again, blood running down his nose and smeared over his mouth. Between that and the paleness of his face, Wyatt looked ghoulish, almost like a newly dead corpse.

Flynn looked around them. “We seem to be in a cellar.” He could see preserved peaches and other foods on a set of shelves across from them, a large pile of firewood stacked up along the wall to their right, and a table covered in various tools of some kind to their left. In the far left corner was a staircase leading up to the next floor.

Wyatt crawled up out of the doorway, into the light from a lantern left standing on the table, and Flynn realized just how covered in dirt Wyatt was. He was sure he looked about the same.

“Careful,” Flynn hissed as Wyatt began to explore the space.

“I’m always careful,” Wyatt shot back.

“Somehow I doubt that.”

Wyatt went over to the table, frowning down at it. From this lower angle—the tunnel basically emerged up out of the floor of the cellar—Flynn couldn’t see what all was on the table. Wyatt picked up a piece of paper of some kind, set it back down, then turned to Flynn. “Um, do you remember what Lucy’s last name is?”

“Preston, why?”

“Didn’t her mother—wasn’t her mother the one who put her in the asylum?”

“…if I recall correctly, then yes. Again: why?”

Wyatt gestured around them. “Because, uh, according to these papers, we’re in the Preston mansion right now.”

* * *

It was dangerous, or so Jiya kept insisting, but she allowed them all to gather for the first time, the five of them, in the main room, the one that Rufus was thinking of as the gathering room.

“It leads to my mother’s house?” Lucy asked, after Rufus had listened to Wyatt, Flynn, and Lucy all explained what they’d found. “But…”

“Your mother was the one who put you here, and told you that Amy wasn’t real,” Wyatt pointed out.

“I know that I probably have said this a lot,” Rufus said, “but white people are fucking crazy. What are they trying to do?”

“Summon something,” Flynn said. “Or that’s what it sounds like from the files Lucy found. And Wyatt found papers with odd symbols and instructions on the table in the cellar.”

Rufus, frankly, thought the best course of action was to get the hell out of dodge. They were all being kept like sacrificial lambs so they could be fed to some, what, thing? No way. He had not signed up for this. He was getting out while the getting was good.

“I don’t know what it is,” Jiya said, “but I know that it’s… terrifying. They don’t tell me anything, and I regret taking this post but—perhaps it’s a good thing that I did. Mason would only tell me that he knows it’s something evil. He wouldn’t describe it or give it a name. I’m not sure he even knows. But he knows enough to be scared of it.”

“It’s affecting us all, that’s what’s driving us mad, more than anything they’re doing to us,” Lucy said with sudden conviction. Rufus raised his eyebrows. Lucy Preston had struck him at first as a very bookish, scared type, but there was a backbone in her that emerged at times. One he hoped she would hold onto. “I know it. It’s the shadows, they’re alive, this building is alive, all of it, like it’s part of this monster starting to seep into our world. And it wants us. It’s like the—the madness is salting for the meat. Making it taste better.”

“The ritual is supposed to be performed on All Hallows Eve,” Jiya said. “That’s what Mason told me. When the veil between this world and others is thin.”

“If we shadows have offended…” Flynn murmured. Rufus had heard Mason quote Shakespeare far too many times to not recognize the phrase.

“We’re a far cry from _A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream_,” he replied. “I’d rather deal with Oberon than this.”

Flynn smirked at him in an appreciative sort of way, as if he was glad to see that someone had picked up on the reference.

“We have to stop them,” Lucy said. “They have my sister, they have Amy—and Wyatt’s wife, Jessica. She thinks they’re—I don’t know what she thinks, but she believes in them and I’m sure they’re feeding her lies.”

“Rufus and I could prevail upon Mason to bring in the constabulary,” Jiya said.

“The constabulary?” Wyatt scoffed. “What would they do against a monster from another—another world?”

“Something,” Jiya countered, bristling.

Rufus hesitated, but then thought _oh what the hell_ and placed his hand on Jiya’s. To his surprise she gripped it tightly, looking at him with warm, wet eyes. He remembered her telling him of seeing his death, him and the others, and he gripped back just as tightly, resisting the urge to bring her hand to his lips and kiss the knuckles.

“Why don’t you bring the constabulary. They’ll need to be arrested for their crimes, not in the least the murder of my wife and child,” Flynn said, a growl entering his voice at the end. “But that will take time. Lucy is wanted for the ritual, her mother wants her to be a part of Rittenhouse. So she, Wyatt and I will go down into the tunnels and—delay them somehow. There has to be something.”

“I’m not sure,” Jiya said, her voice rough and low. “They’ve pushed you all so far, what if your minds finally snap? Whatever this is, I’m not sure any one person is meant to see it and survive.”

“You could,” Rufus pointed out. Jiya saw visions of the future. She had been all alone here, keeping them all from falling off the cliff into madness, for weeks. Or months. He was still fuzzy on time. If anyone could see a monster-god from another world, and make it, it would be Jiya.

She colored a little and squeezed his hand. “Well. Let’s not count on that.”

“We’ll simply stop it before the five people are sacrificed and the… thing… is unleashed,” Wyatt said with his brash confidence.

Rufus snorted.

“I know it’s not much of a plan,” Lucy said, “but it’s the only plan we have. And we must do something. I would rather die doing something about this than wait here for them to do something to us.”

Rufus could admit that he agreed with the sentiment. And it wasn’t as though he had any better ideas.

“All right,” he said. “All Hallows Eve, we set our pluck and reckless determination against a powerful rich cult summoning a monster-god. I like our chances.”

Jiya, surprise of surprises, giggled—and then kissed him on the cheek.

Oh.

He could fight a whole legion of monster-gods just for that.

* * *

Flynn was sure that there weren’t as many branching-off tunnels the last time they’d come down here. He tried to keep a hold of Lucy and Wyatt, but he needed a hand to brush along the ceiling to keep them oriented, and at some point—Lucy was holding onto his shirt wasn’t she? That was how they had started out.

The damp, decaying smell of the earth pressed in around him. He tried to breathe and found it harder than he had anticipated. It felt as though the air around him was becoming thicker, more solid, plugging up his nose and throat.

“Lucy?” he whispered as he squeezed Wyatt’s hand. He felt a tug on his shirt in response, even as it also felt like the darkness was sliding and coiling around his body. Flynn heaved a sigh of relief and turned his head back, even though he knew he wouldn’t be able to see her. “Thought I’d lost you for a moment.”

He dared to release the ceiling and reach down to feel for her hand, only to find that the hand he grasped was much smaller and colder than Lucy’s.

The hand holding his left hand tightened suddenly, jerking him, nails digging in, and it didn’t feel like Wyatt’s large, rough hand at all, it felt like—

Flynn spun around to find Lorena and Iris staring at him. He could see them, somehow, even in the pitch darkness, their skulls fractured and open, Iris’s one remaining eye staring blankly, Lorena’s jaw unhinged.

“Won’t you check the closet for monsters, _Tata_?” Iris asked.

Flynn couldn’t help himself—he screamed.

* * *

Wyatt held onto Flynn’s hand, stumbling along. Jesus, was this tunnel as twisty the last time? It was hard to tell anything in the dark. Was it just him, or did it feel like the darkness was sliding over their bodies like ink?

“Flynn?” he whispered. “Lucy? You guys feeling this?”

“Wyatt?” Lucy’s voice sounded incredibly far away. “It’s so dark…”

“Lucy? Flynn? Where’s Flynn?” Wyatt tried to feel up Flynn’s arm from the hand he was holding, only it didn’t feel like a proper arm at all, it felt slimy and oddly boneless—

The thing tugged on him, hard, and Wyatt stumbled forward, finding himself staring into the face of… fuck, Dave, Dave Baumgartner, one of the men he’d had to leave behind—it was a mission gone wrong but oh fuck, Dave, half of Dave’s face was missing, it was just _missing_—

“Lucy! Flynn!” Wyatt scrambled back, trying to get away, but Dave’s face didn’t retreat. He turned and ran, running into the wall, stumbling, and then he felt hands on his face and he screamed again and the person said, “Wyatt, stop, stop it, stay here with me, I need you!” and he realized it was Lucy.

He clung to her, unable to see her in the dark. “Lucy I don’t know what’s going on, I don’t know what’s real.”

“I’m real.” Lucy held him, thank God, Lucy was holding him. She pressed a kiss to his forehead. “We need to find Flynn, it—it did something, it separated us—Garcia! Flynn! Garcia!”

“Don’t go,” Wyatt begged, holding onto her.

“I’m not leaving.” Lucy got up onto her knees and Wyatt realized at some point that he’d fallen down. Up and down, right and left, had no meaning here. It was like being in a grave. “Flynn!” Lucy called again. “Garcia!”

A shout or scream of some kind echoed from far away, like a noise heard across the water of a lake, and Wyatt shivered. “We have to get out of here. It wasn’t like this before, when Flynn and I were here, it’s like something’s woken up.”

“They’re waking it up,” Lucy said. “Rittenhouse.”

She stood up, letting Wyatt hold onto her legs, her hand in his hair. “_Garcia!_” She sounded close to panicked.

“Flynn?” Wyatt called out as well. Flynn was so solid, so steady, nothing broke him. Nothing could take him, could it? If it took Flynn, how could it not take the rest of them?

Again there came a faint yell, or shout.

“Come on,” Lucy whispered, tugging at him. “Come on, Wyatt, come on.”

She led him through the dark, calling for Flynn, until the noise in response began to grow louder and Wyatt realized it was Flynn just as he and Lucy smacked right into him, the three of them falling and banging their heads and elbows on each other.

“Lucy?” Flynn asked, sounding frantic.

“It’s me,” Lucy promised, and then, “I thought the darkness swallowed you,” and Wyatt heard Flynn make a startled noise in response to—

Well, he couldn’t see a damn thing but he knew what a kiss sounded like.

He wished like anything he could see Flynn’s face, because it had to be priceless, and he felt a sort of odd jealousy because he realized with a start that he wanted to make Flynn sound startled like that, but he also didn’t mind because it was Lucy. Before he could process any of it, he felt Flynn grabbing him, and the three of them were holding onto each other, somehow, his face pressed into the crook of Flynn’s neck, and he let himself feel them and smell them and know that they were real. They were all real.

“It’s waking up,” Lucy whispered, her breath tickling Wyatt’s ear. “It’s waking up, Garcia.”

“And it’s toying with us,” Flynn replied gravely.

Flynn got to his feet, pulling Wyatt and Lucy with him, and then Lucy said, “here, here,” and Flynn was opening the door to the cellar.

Light spilled in, revealing the room much the same as before, but different in one crucial way, one that Wyatt didn’t realize until he had climbed out and seen the table again.

Jess was lying on it.

Or, what remained of her.

* * *

Rufus paced up and down as Jiya watched him. “How can we trust him?” he asked. “I hate that I’m saying this because I’ve known him for a decade now but after all this time—”

“Mason wasn’t doing anything because he thought you were safe here,” Jiya replied. “He thought you were safest if you were kept out of the way. He didn’t know about the sacrifices or what they were trying to do to you.”

“Now that he knows, though—it’s even more dangerous than he thought.” Maybe it was wrong of him to attribute such cowardice and disloyalty to someone who had been his family and his mentor for so long, but Rufus couldn’t shake the awful, sick feeling of being abandoned. Of being forgotten and swept aside. Even if Mason’s intentions had been pure…

Jiya stood up and went to the window. “There’s a carriage approaching. That must be Mason’s.”

“What if it isn’t?”

“A carriage coming to the asylum at this time of night? When Rittenhouse is all at the Preston residence to start the ritual? Who else could it be?”

Jiya took his hand, and Rufus nearly jumped out of his skin. She led him purposefully down the hall, and the entire time, Rufus felt like the shadows were watching them.

“Is it just me or does it feel like this place doesn’t want us to leave?” Rufus asked. “And not in a warm cozy kind of way?”

“It doesn’t,” Jiya said bluntly.

The guard at the front door was asleep—the door that Rufus hadn’t seen since he’d been all but dragged in here. “I put something in his tea,” Jiya explained, carefully lifting the keys off him and unlocking the front door.

They hurried across the courtyard, the shadows lengthening towards them like skeletal fingers stretching out, and Rufus felt almost as though hands were wrapping around his throat and squeezing. “Jiya,” he whispered, terrified down to his very bones, and she squeezed his hand in response.

“Almost there,” she replied, as the carriage pulled up in front of the gates.

Rufus noticed Jiya’s hands shaking as she looked for the key to undo the front gates. “It’s messing with my mind,” she whispered. “I don’t know which keys—they look like fingers—”

Rufus took the keys from her and held them up to the moonlight, selecting a large brass one and fitting it into the lock. The gate seemed to put up a resistance, the feeling of strangulation growing stronger, like a rope tightening—but then the lock clicked and the gate swung open, and he could breathe.

The carriage door opened. “Rufus?” It was Mason. “Hurry up, we haven’t got all night.”

“Took you long enough,” Rufus snapped, helping Jiya into the carriage. “We have to alert the constabulary!”

“What for?”

“Mass murder,” Rufus replied grimly, slamming the carriage door shut behind them.

* * *

Lucy heard Wyatt make an awful sobbing noise and she scrambled up into the cellar—her cellar, her home, although she wasn’t down here often since it was a room mostly for the use of the servants—to see Wyatt staring in horror at a body on a table.

Flynn got up too and hissed, “Lucy don’t—” but it was too late. She saw it.

Nausea rose in her and she bent over, retching, the lack of food they’d been giving her at the asylum the only thing keeping her from vomiting all over the dirt floor.

“What did they do to her?” she whispered, her voice breaking a thousand different ways.

“I don’t think,” Flynn said, his voice at once harsh and soft, “that you wish to know, Lucy.”

She avoided looking at the sad remains of the woman and groped for Wyatt instead, turning him away, taking his face. “Wyatt, Wyatt please, stay with me.” She needed him to stay focused.

“That was Jess,” he whispered. Tears slid down his face. “Lucy, that’s _Jess_…”

Behind them, Lucy could see Flynn undoing the nails that pinned skin and muscle and sinew to the table, rearranging the limbs, and finding a cloth to cover it all. Making Jess look somewhat human again.

“Five sacrifices,” Lucy whispered. “Jess was one of them.”

“And I’m sure we’re meant to be fetched through the tunnel and made the others,” Flynn said grimly. He grabbed a long knife, carefully wiping the blood off it. “Wyatt, grab a weapon.”

Wyatt grabbed what looked like some kind of fireplace poker.

Lucy pulled herself away from him—pressed a quick kiss to his cheek as she saw his hands shaking—and moved carefully up the stairs. She knew this house, knew it intimately, and yet right now it felt as though she did not know it at all. It was as if she had stepped away from the firm reality that she knew and into a new, shadowy mirror world, like Alice through the Looking-Glass, everything twisted, every shadow holding a danger.

She eased open the door to the cellar and heard low, chanting noises.

“The first part is complete,” someone said, an older man. Lucy thought she recognized his voice, but she couldn’t be sure. “We will need to fetch the others.”

“Will Lucy be ready?” a woman said. She also sounded familiar. Her tone was scathing, doubtful.

“She is ready,” another woman replied, impatient, and Lucy knew that tone better than she knew almost any other. It was her mother.

Anger filled her, pushing away the fear, and for a moment it felt like the shadows around them were pushed back as well, cringing in the face of her fury. Lucy strode forward, ignoring Wyatt and Flynn’s frantic whispers behind her, and threw open the doors to her mother’s study.

Carolyn Preston rarely let anyone into her study, but even the few times that Lucy had been in it, she had noted its features. And this was not how it had looked.

All furniture had been taken from the room and the thick dark rug that usually adorned the floor was pulled back so that the bare boards might be seen, on which were painted strange symbols that seized Lucy’s heart in terror, even if she couldn’t understand what they meant. The symbols all formed a circle, interlocking at places, and in the center was a dark, thick, wet patch of blood.

_Jessica_.

“Lucy will never be ready,” someone else said, and Lucy felt her heart smash to pieces.

This whole time, her mind had been pushed to the brink, threatening to snap, but nothing had taken it over that edge. And now it wasn’t fear that was making her break. It was anger, pure, red anger, as she saw a dark-haired man yank her sister, her _sister_, into the center of the circle of symbols.

Lucy didn’t even realize she was screaming until the others all whipped their heads around to stare at her, mouths open in surprise, and she launched herself at the man, clawing at his face and arms until he let go. “Release her!” she was screaming. “Let her alone or I’ll let the shadows have you, I’ll rip you apart, let her go!”

“Lucy,” Mother said, her voice all honey and lavender, but Lucy whirled on her too as the young man staggered back, dumbfounded.

“You’re a harpy,” she screamed. “You’re a monster, you’re, you’re something you shouldn’t find outside of a kennel!”

“This is ridiculous,” the young man said. “I will not have my opportunity to be the vessel interrupted, Carolyn, control your daughter! Our Lord is coming any moment now and we must have the souls ready for him or he will take ours instead!”

“Oh, dear, Wyatt, did you hear that?” Flynn said from the doorway. Lucy saw him step into the room, the knife held up like a fencing sword for a moment before he idly twirled it between his fingers, showing that he knew exactly how to use it. “I don’t think I got my soul ready, did you?”

“Nope,” Wyatt replied, eyeing the others with a mad sort of sharpness. “I’m afraid I’m not all that pure at the moment. Kind of thinking about revenge for the vivisection of my wife, you know how it is.”

Lucy recognized two of the other people in the room, now: Dr. Cahill and Dr. Whitmore. The former looked outraged, while the latter looked reluctantly impressed, if annoyed.

Amy was bound, but she managed to wiggle over to Lucy’s legs, pressing herself against her. Her poor sister looked even worse off than Lucy had been, her hair tangled and dirty, her face bruised, and her skin sallow. “I knew you wouldn’t agree with this,” she murmured, like now that Lucy was here it was all right to just let go and pass out.

“Nicholas!” Carolyn snapped. “Emma, for goodness’ sake, take care of them!” She gestured angrily at Flynn and Wyatt.

“I can’t do that, I’m the vessel, what if I’m hurt?” Nicholas protested.

“Oh, don’t be such a baby,” Emma Whitmore said, pulling a long, bloodied knife from somewhere on her person. “I’ve worked far too hard for you idiots to all mess it up now.”

The house gave an odd moan and a shake, as if it was a creature waking itself up, and Lucy could have sworn she saw the shadows twisting of their own accord.

She had to get Amy out of the circle.

She grabbed Amy, hauling her out, her arms shaking with effort, as her mother lunged for her. “No, Lucy, no! It must be done, we all must make sacrifices!”

“Get off of her!” Lucy screamed, and she kicked her mother away, dragging Amy out of the circle. “I don’t care if it’s to God Himself, I’m not letting you hurt her!”

The house shook again, as Wyatt launched himself at Dr. Cahill and Flynn engaged with Nicholas. Carolyn Preston screamed at Lucy, at Cahill, at all of them, as if she thought she was somehow still in charge.

Wyatt sent his poker crashing into the side of Cahill’s skull and the doctor felt into the circle. The blood spilled onto the bare floor, and everyone screamed in some way or another as the symbols flared with a sickening light, a light that was not like any color Lucy had ever seen, something about it terrible and forbidden, making her want to vomit, and she had to look away—

“No!” Carolyn screamed in frustration. “It’s not supposed to be _him_, it’s not done _properly_—”

Lucy shielded Amy’s face, squeezing her eyes shut tight, and then the wave of nausea passed and the room was lit normally again.

“Don’t look, Lucy!” It was Flynn.

Wyatt swore, and she heard more clashing and yelling, and then she heard Flynn yell in pain.

She opened her eyes then.

Emma had stabbed Flynn in the shoulder, her eyes gleaming, and he grunted in pain again before shoving her back. He advanced on her like a wolf, and Emma snarled in return, the both of them circling.

“Fuck this,” Emma snapped. “Guess subtlety’s out the window.”

Nicholas was still engaged with Wyatt, the two of them dancing around each other, and Emma grabbed Nicholas by the throat. “Sacrifice number three!” she yelled, howled almost, and she stabbed him in the neck.

Lucy nearly retched again, then turned and began to undo Amy’s bindings. “You have to get out of here,” she said, her fingers shaking so badly it was hard to get her sister free.

“Not without you,” Amy whispered. “Do you have any idea what that thing is that they’re summoning!? You should’ve seen what they did to this other woman, Jessica—”

“The same thing that just happened to Dr. Cahill, I’m sure, and is about to happen to Nicholas. I won’t have it happen to you.” Lucy got the knots around her sister’s wrists undone and began to work on Amy’s feet.

“He was our vessel! Our vessel for our Lord!” Carolyn was shrieking at Emma as the house shook again, like the very foundations were about to crumble.

“I’m the vessel now,” Emma snapped. “And if you don’t like it, you can join him!”

“Mother, look out!” Amy cried out, a child’s instinct to take care of her mother overriding anything else.

Lucy turned, saw Emma plunge the knife into Carol’s stomach, and screamed. She leapt to her feet and made to go after Emma but Flynn caught her, hauling her back. “It’s not safe!” he yelled. “Lucy, stay back from the circle!”

Wyatt stumbled out of the way as Carolyn Preston was thrown into the circle with Nicholas. Lucy tore at Flynn’s arms, sure she could get to her mother in time, before that creature emerged, sure that she—

The sickening colors flashed again and Lucy felt something warm trickling down from her nose, down from her ears, as she stared into the heart of it, watched as something like shadow and tentacle, something more than either of those things, halfway emerged from the circle to rip and rend at the bodies of Nicholas and her mother.

“Lucy!” Flynn yanked her down so she could no longer see, cradling her to his chest despite his wounded shoulder. “Don’t look, _draga_, Lucy, don’t look!”

“What in the holy _fuck_,” Wyatt shouted, and then Lucy heard, improbably, the sound of the front door.

“…did someone just ring the doorbell?” Wyatt asked as the noise and light subsided.

Whether the doorbell rang or not, Lucy heard the door then be forced open, and she raised her head to find Rufus and Jiya stumbling in, both looking rather shocked.

“The constabulary are on their way,” Rufus said, “and um, what should we tell them is going on here?”

“Witchcraft,” Amy said, so deadpan that Lucy nearly burst into hysterical laughter.

Flynn staggered to his feet as Emma stood in front of the—the thing, the creature, that was still somehow there. Not fully there, not yet, but with four sacrifices to its name, it was nearly across.

“Emma,” Flynn snarled.

She turned her coal-bright eyes onto him. “I don’t want you,” she sneered. “I want _her_.” She pointed her knife at Lucy. “Princess Preston, the one her mother insisted would see the light. I told her, I told Carolyn that Lucy was never going to change her mind, no matter what you did to her, but she insisted she knew better.”

Behind Emma, Wyatt raised his poker questioningly at Flynn, as if to suggest that he go for it.

“Dr. Whitmore,” Flynn said, his voice low and sharp as the two advanced on each other again, “I am capable of great compassion and great ruthlessness. Be careful which you ignite.”

Lucy hurried to finish undoing Amy’s ankles. “Go, go!” she whispered, shoving her towards Rufus, who automatically caught Amy and put her behind him.

“What is that?” Rufus said again, still horrified.

“It’s what I’ve been seeing,” Jiya replied. “Get back, get out of here, all of you! Including you, Dr. Whitmore!”

Flynn lunged at Emma, but it turned out to be a feint, allowing him to spin her towards Wyatt, who ran the poker through her, pinning her in place as she and Flynn went for each other again, Flynn taking another hit to his arm as he drove the knife into Emma’s chest, all the way up to the hilt.

Emma made a horrible choking noise that had Lucy’s knees going weak.

“Don’t let her fall inside the circle!” Jiya cried out, and she raised her hand as the creature gave a sort of roar that was not so much heard as felt. Lucy averted her eyes, an icy terror seizing her such as she had never known, and she knew instinctively that to look directly at this thing was to go mad.

“Wyatt!” she heard Flynn yell, and there was the sound of bodies hitting the floor. _Don’t look, _she wanted to scream, but her mouth was dry, the sound stolen from it.

“Back!” It was Jiya, and she knew without looking that Jiya was staring into the creature. “I know you, I see you, I see your colors! Back! You hold no darkness for me, I see your colors! Back!”

The creature gave a horrendous shrieking noise that had Lucy’s teeth rattling and more blood sliding out of her nose. She managed to drag her gaze upward and saw Jiya standing more towards the center of the room now, her hands outstretched, her hair wild and blowing like in a hurricane, her eyes glowing. She was bleeding from the nose and ears as well, and the tell-tale thumping noise that Lucy had heard in the walls of the asylum was now everywhere around her, the shadows writhing, coalescing into the creature.

Jiya grit her teeth, her fingers curling like claws. “_I see your colors,_” she roared, as if she was speaking in multiple voices. “_There is no fear in me!_”

The creature gave a final shriek, and then Jiya screamed, a raw, ragged sort of scream that sounded like it was tearing her throat bloody, and with a great roar of wind the shadows all were sucked back into the circle and were gone so fast that Lucy’s ears popped.

Silence rang.

Lucy’s vision blurred and she stumbled, disoriented, bells jangling in her ears. Jiya sank to her knees, pale and shaking. Her eyes were glassy. Rufus yelled something, and it sounded like he was underwater, a great distance away, as he ran to Jiya and held her.

Flynn tried to get to his feet and stumbled, grasping at his shoulder, his terribly bleeding shoulder, and Wyatt helped him up, said something, pulling Flynn’s hand away—it was bloody—and yet Wyatt kissed Flynn’s fingertips anyway.

“Lucy.” It was Amy, helping her up. “Lucy, it’s gone, we have to go.”

Sound slowly came back to her as there came the tramping of feet and the constabulary arrived, officers in their crisp dark blue uniforms asking questions and demanding to know what was going on. A smart-looking gentleman who seemed to be called Mason was trying to explain things, saying some ‘crazed cult’ was trying to kill people and drive them mad.

Lucy’s head finally finished clearing as she realized she was sitting down in her mother’s desk chair, clutching Amy’s hand. Someone tried to tug Amy away and Lucy shook her head to get rid of the last of the cobwebs, seeing that it was a doctor of some kind.

“No,” she said, yanking Amy back towards her.

“It’s a real doctor, a good doctor,” Flynn said. When had Flynn arrived? “She needs to make sure Amy’s all right, she’s malnourished like us.”

Lucy looked up and saw that Flynn’s shoulder was now bandaged. Wyatt was standing next to him. Both of them were still bloody, including blood on Wyatt’s lips from where he had kissed Flynn’s hand.

“What do they want with us?” she asked.

“Our statements.” Flynn kneeled down so that they were of a height, gently taking her hand. “And then we can do whatever we want. Go wherever we want. It’s all right, Lucy. Jiya sent it back.”

“Her visions,” Wyatt said.

Lucy wasn’t sure what that meant, but she trusted them. “I want to go away. To a place with a big sky.”

“Mason owns a gold mine in San Francisco, that’s where Jiya and Rufus are headed,” Wyatt said dryly. “Want to go panning for gold?”

“Yes,” she replied, completely serious.

The doctor came back with Amy and then gently introduced herself to Lucy as Michelle, asking if she could take her temperature and examine her. Lucy reached out clumsily for Flynn’s hand, holding it tightly as the doctor did her work.

“What in God’s name did they do to you in there?” Michelle asked, jotting down some notes. “Heavy meals for all of you in the upcoming weeks. And plenty of bracing walks.”

Flynn squeezed her hand. “I’m sure that won’t be a problem, doctor.”

“I want to get out of the damp,” Lucy said, ignoring Michelle to continue their previous conversation. “I would like the desert.”

“Then we’ll go,” Flynn said. “Wherever you want to go, Lucy. I’ll follow.”

Wyatt cleared his throat awkwardly, blushing, and nodded.

Michelle got up and went over to the woman who seemed to be in charge of the constabulary, a Christopher something, and Lucy added, quietly, “Are there monsters in San Francisco?”

Amy, surprisingly, was the one who spoke. “There are monsters everywhere, Lucy. But none like that. Not anymore.”

_Not anymore_.

To feel the sun on her face, the feel the fresh air, to see a world, a sky, that stretched on forever, no walls, no shadows, just light…

She looked at Flynn and Wyatt. “Then let’s go. I am half-sick of shadows.”

Wyatt looked confused, as did Amy, but Flynn caught the reference and smiled. “There is no doom upon us,” he paraphrased.

Light began to spill in from the window at the far end of the room, soft warm light filled with pastel colors, colors that Lucy recognized, dove grey and blushing pink and periwinkle, and she knew, in a kernel of her heart that no shadows or madness could reach, that Flynn was right.


End file.
